There are several big, pay-per-use online press release distribution websites (e.g. prweb.com, 24-7pressrelease.com, ereleases.com), but is there any real SEO value in these services? My guess is no.

Why, do I think that? Well, even though the links from the press release may be "dofollow," I'm willing to bet the Google assigns little to no PageRank value to them.

The main page of the site may have a PR of 6 or 7, but every press release on the site has a Google Toolbar PR of "unranked," and while I understand that the toolbar PR is based on old data, it only makes sense that Google would not assign any value to the press release itself. I'm sure the same goes for Bing and Yahoo! as well.

I am also amazed by the service prices, which start out at a minimum of around $200. A little pricy for something that will most likely drive zero traffic to a website.

Last thing to consider -- Who the heck reads the press releases anyway? Answer: Nobody. They just end up in the void space that is a press release archive.